BILLIONS of dollars and millions of hours have been committed to the metaverse, the buzzy vision of a digital world that promises to transform human life. Yet for all the hype, we have yet to pin down exactly what it will be and why it will matter.
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One of the first to take a stab at explaining it is Matthew Ball, CEO of US venture capital fund, Epyllion. The Metaverse: And how it will revolutionize everything builds on Ball鈥檚 punchy essays about this virtual future, which are much loved by the tech community. However, in leaping from long essays to a 352-page book, his writing loses some of the lustre for which he has been praised.
Ball also struggles to define his readership and their level of expertise. Many general readers won鈥檛 make it through the tonally confusing first section. Here, information washes over you with little explanation of the thinking behind the way it is presented. Ball veers from a generalised picture of the metaverse and how to access it to manual-like details about how to render environments in real-time. Readers are expected to be know-nothings and know-it-alls simultaneously.
The basics are often not that basic. Ball says, seemingly without irony, that 鈥渋n a simplified sense, the metaverse era can be thought of as involving the use of bits to produce 3D alarm clocks made of virtual atoms鈥�. This is part of a metaphor that clearly got lost in translation. I also got lost 鈥� and I write about the metaverse a lot.
For some, that would be enough reason to put the book down. But persevere and see the fog clear 鈥� slowly. Chapters on bringing the various iterations of the developing metaverse together, making them interact, and the hardware required, are lucid and logical.
The third section is even better. Ball prophesies about when, where and how the metaverse might arrive, and what it could do to our lives. Its strength is testament to years of thinking deeply about the area.
However, much of the book belies that expertise. It may be the format: The Metaverse feels like extended thematic essays looped together, rather than building a cohesive narrative.
Throughout, intellectual nuggets await those willing to plough on: for example, there are great insights on the risks of tech monopolisation. But it takes willpower to find the gold among the grit.
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